Redundant locks robustious!

Post-MLA reflections to follow. But first, I wanted to put in a plug (proleptic pun alert!) for a website, an advertisement for which I saw while using a urinal in a restaurant bathroom.

Disclaimer: Miltonista has no affiliation with the website linked above. Miltonista has no medical expertise and cannot vouch for the effectiveness or safety of the services offered through said website.

It's the most wonderful time of the year

Miltonista is going to wake up very, very early (or, perhaps, just stay up super late) to head to San Francisco tomorrow. Many of my comrades seem to be there already.

See you at the hotel bar. (I've made the un-Abdiel-like decision to skip the Milton Society's dinner this year, but I may try to join the cocktail hour.)

Ho, ho, ho

Milton would hate the word "Christmas," so he wishes you a Feliz Navidad. Not being anti-Catholic myself, Miltonista wishes you Merry Christmas. (He himself, however, isn't so merry--grades still need to be turned in; bags need to be packed for MLAmas; his car needs to be retrieved from the auto shop that screwed up his car and needed to keep the car for two days instead of one hour.... but I digress.)

* * *

This is the month, and this the happy morn, &tc.

A little too late for Christmas shopping

An unexpected result of receiving student essays via my gmail account: Google knows that I'm interested in Milton, and flashed this link to Milton goodies at cafepress.com. No, I'm not affiliated with this site nor will I receive any kickbacks (although they sure would be welcome). It just strikes me as funny that a Milton gift shop online would be a serious enough venture to advertise itself through Google mail.

The Sorrows of Young Miltonista

Confession: I, Miltonista, am petty, easily excitable, and not (yet) terribly accomplished. And thus, when one of the organizers of The Young Milton Conference e-mailed me inviting me to submit a proposal, I pumped my inner fist and declared that I had finally entered the ranks of the anointed.

Small problem: I don't really write about Milton's earlier writings. In fact, my current project is quite explicitly focused on Milton's later writings. 

Less small problem: the CFP is due tomorrow. Except I'm on the gauche side of the pond, so tomorrow is actually today. Fortunately, the abstracts only have to be two-hundred words long, but I'm not sure what I've been producing holds any water. But I've promised one friend/colleague that I'd apply so I'd better give it a shot.

(I realize that this entry gives away the fact that I am not any of the Miltonists whose abstracts already appear on the website. My apologies to those of you who were hoping I was Robert Appelbaum. Come to think of it, I might be happier if I were Robert Appelbaum--but that's the petty Miltonista talking.)

Of education

Yesterday marked the last official day of my semester, and my day ended with my Milton class. This particular class provides extra impetus for some retro- (if not intro-) spection because it was the first time I'd taught a full-on Milton course.

It was, for most of my students, a long and hard-fought campaign. Especially tough were the early poems. I think I eased the students in on the first day of class with "On Shakespeare," which they found relatively accessible with a few bits of explanation from me. But the second day featured "On the Death of a Fair Infant" and the Nativity Ode, and, well, the students looked at me like I was a madman as I tried to talk about grim Aquilo. That session kick-started some lean weeks, when students struggled to get a basic sense of what Milton was saying. (The most memorable highlight of those weeks: seeing them perk up at the gums of glutinous heat, especially when I mentioned Debra Shuger's wet-dream argument.)

The prose, too, was tough, but students started getting into some of the fundamental impasses in Milton's thought--they were particularly riled up about the clash between championing liberty and freedom on the one hand and a strong sense of propriety and the good on the other. At this point, however, the class sessions started to confirm my fears that students were engaging with some Miltonic ideas, but not necessarily directly with the text. Example: we'd read an excerpt, I'd point out some provocative stuff about it, to which students would often ask, sometimes petulantly, "Are you saying...?" To which my response was normally, "I'm not saying anything. I'm just trying to explain what Milton's saying here." And so forth. Alas, this pattern often dogged our discussions of the major poems. The class did pick up considerably, and I, at least, had a really good time talking through the texts. But I never really was able to shake the feeling that there was too much summarizing and paraphrasing. (I'm not sure if this means I'm more or less resistant to using something like Daniel Denison's "translation"--am I fundamentally opposed to paraphrasing or do I find it unavoidable? If the latter, do I want someone else to do the paraphrasing, or do I want to shoulder that responsibility?)

I tried, as much as possible, to present a balanced Milton, and not just the Milton I happen to believe in & construct in my own scholarship. This proved difficult. Most of the students, for example, bought the Satanist angle even though they seemed impressed by the elegant neatness of the Surprised By Sin argument. I often made qualifications in class like, "For a Satanist/reprobate/sinful reader like me...." But having my own ideas challenged by the material was quite a welcome experience. This time around, I was really struck by how difficult it is to swallow completely the revisionist reader of Samson Agonistes. Perhaps this was the most trite and mundane of epiphanies, but the last several weeks of class made me realize how, as I revise my chapter on Paradise Regained and Samson, I'll have to find some ways to move away from (if not out of) the orthodox/revisionist positions. I think it'll have something to do with eating, but more on that in another post (I dare not say anon).

To the question of what I'd do to improve the course next time, I don't have any crystal clear answers. The difficulty of teaching Milton, especially the shorter, non-lyric poems, is his damned allusiveness. I realized that explaining a juicy allusion is like explaining a funny joke: the very fact of explanation ruins things. There were exceptions, of course, including the dragon's teeth in Areopagitica or the Eve-Narcissus-Echo connection. But even the Cupid-Psyche allusion at the end of Comus was surprisingly tough going. Perhaps my biggest challenge in subsequent attempts at teaching Milton will be to find new ways to motivate students to track down allusions actively on their own. Only time will tell whether that struggle will be Herculean, Sisyphean, Psychic, Promethean, or Narcissistic.

Milton on the Radio

Surely the whole Samson-terrorism angle is a bit played out, but this BBC Radio interview with Neil Forsyth and Feisal G. Mohamed on the topic is still worth checking out. (Fast forward to about minute 14 or 15 to skip the other stuff--I think it's about Shakespeare or something.) I think I'll play some of this for my class tomorrow to kick-start our second discussion of Samson.

Because it's already tomorrow in England

"How soon hath time," &tc.

A couple of years ago, I was on a Milton panel at a conference, and for some reason I can't quite recall, I asked one of my fellow panelists about Intelligent Design theory and what Milton might've made about the recent debates about it. This panelist declared (somewhat unsurprisingly) that he thought Milton would've endorsed Intelligent Design, and then went on to proclaim (more surprisingly) that atheism would be proven but a minor blip in the history of ideas. Another panelist was sufficiently taken aback by this claim to point out that the Intelligent Design party is so very stupid (his word) and that Milton was enough of an intellectual snob to dissociate himself from such a crowd.

I recall this minor exchange because it raises, in my mind, a silly question with big consequences: if we could resurrect Milton and give him a few years to catch up on the last several centuries worth of history, would he remain a devout Christian or would he become an atheist? A silly question, of course, because it's a playgroundish bit of impossible what-if thinking. But I think it's important because our answer reveals what kind of Milton we imagine. Answers to this question aren't simply black-and-white, since we have to allow for a suppler definition of what it means to be a devout Christian. Still, I think that divergent answers to this question will ultimately point to a belief in the different Miltons that John Rumrich has described: either a doctrinaire Milton who knows the answers to the big questions, or a Milton who asks the big questions sincerely, in a spirit of genuine interrogation. (And, yes, I am simply assuming that developments in history--intellectual and otherwise--between Milton's time and our own have pointed to atheism as the more reasonable position.)

As much as my sympathies lie with Rumrich's claim for the open-ended Milton, it's also clear that the capacious or "progressive" attitudes that we find in Milton all have clearly defined limits. Familiar examples abound: belief in intellectual/spiritual compability as essential to marriage encounters a limit in adherence to patriarchy, so that only a husband should be able to seek divorce; the claim against censorship and for freedom in publication and enquiry does not extend to Roman Catholics. It seems simply true that theism itself would be such a limit: sincere intellectual enquiry might only be sanctioned insofar as it upholds rather than challenges a basic belief in God. The Chorus in Samson Agonistes, echoing the Psalmist, declares that if atheists even exist, "they walk obscure, / For of such doctrine never was there school / But the heart of the fool." And Adam's first waking experience is a kind of Intelligent Design fantasy, as his unaided reason quickly reaches the conclusion that "some great Maker" must have made the nature around him as well as himself. (Eve, on the other hand, reaches no such conclusion on her own.)

I do want to leave some wiggle room for the flexible Milton, the one who might allow even a belief as seemingly non-negotiable as theism to be shaken by debate and reason. Much of Milton's appeal as a thinker stems from his unending struggle toward the truth, from his quest to constantly refine his ideas about God, self, and world. On the other hand, much of his appeal as an artist stems from clashes and fundamental impasses, from the intensity of his effort to balance principles and commitments that prove simply incompatible.

Maybe a present-day Milton would remain a devout Christian, but would internalize so many challenges to his belief system as to undercut it severely. Maybe Milton would quit himself like Milton by being in the camp of foolish atheists without ever admitting it to himself.

Because the last entry was way, way too long

Most overrated book on Milton: C. S. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost.
Most underrated book on Milton: W. B. C. Watkins, An Anatomy of Milton's Verse.

As promised, a post featuring not one but a series of half-baked ideas.

I'm intrigued by literary passages that have created a legacy of misreadings--misreadings so pervasive that they seem to be foundational rather than incidental. One of my favorite examples is a famous crux in Antigone:

The husband lost, another might have been found, and child from another, to replace the first-born: but, father and mother hidden with Hades, no brother's life could ever bloom for me again.

My knowledge of the body of discourse surrounding Antigone is rather slim, but as far as I can tell, everybody from Hegel to Kelly Oliver to, more recently, Joan Copjec willfully misreads what Antigone is saying, turning her declaration into some sort of generalizable statement about the sibling relationship as opposed to a parent-child relationship. Take, for example, Copjec's remarks in Imagine There's No Woman:

Antigone lets us know that her brother is unique, irreplaceable. There will never be another like him. His value to her depends on nothing he has done nor on any of his qualities. She refuses to justify her love for him by giving reasons for it, she calls on no authority, no diety [sic] . . . . Lacan summarizes her stance this way: "Antigone invokes no other right than that one ['this brother is something unique'], a right that emerges in the language of the ineffaceable character of what is ['my brother is my brother'] . . . ."

This all sounds nice and good, but doesn't such a reading ignore the simplicity of what Antigone says? Brothers are not necessarily unique or irreplaceable--it's just that, in her case, her parents happen to be dead. Declarations about the universality of Antigone's claim need to take into account the obvious fact that her situation is marked by a rather banal contingency: perhaps if her parents had been alive, she merely would've asked them to reproduce again rather than burying her brother. The question of what it means that her parents happen to have been Oedipus and Jocasta--as well as the more general question of what the relationship between contingency and universality means in this case--I'll leave to those who are better qualified.

* * *

I wonder if Eve's narration of her first experience at the reflecting pool (what, according to William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, "may be the most reflective, even philosophical account of courtship in all of Renaissance literature") includes another such moment that has produced a rich legacy of misreading:

As I bent down to look, just opposite,
A shape within the watery gleam appeared
Bending to look on me, I started back,
It started back, but pleased I soon returned,
Pleased it returned as soon with answering looks
Of sympathy and love; there I had fixed
Mine eyes till now, and pined with vain desire,
Had not a voice thus warned me, What thou seest,
What there thou seest fair creature is thyself,
With thee it came and goes: but follow me,
And I will bring thee where no shadow stays
Thy coming.

The problematic moment here is the line, "What there thou seest fair creature is thyself." At a conference I recently attended, a Miltonist responded to a talk about queer studies and Narcissus by inquiring about this line. He suggested, sensibly, that there's something peculiarly incorrect about the disembodied voice's lesson: after all, what Eve sees is her reflection, not herself.

What I want to think through here is the possibility of taking the voice's lesson seriously--to say, as literally as possible, that what Eve sees in that pool is her very self. Shouldn't it be quite easy to say that this passage labors to transform Eve into a visual Echo rather than Narcissus, thereby enabling Adam to take his rightful role as the reflected rather than reflection? In this case, the lesson is quite apt: what Eve should learn is that she is a second-order reflection (what she sees in that pool is the essence of herself), and she needs to turn to her original source, Adam, where "no shadow stays / Thy coming."

But I wonder if reading the passage in this way causes a surprising amount of friction, rubbing the wrong way against a pattern of thinking about Narcissus that is for us still inextricably dominated by psychoanalytic thought. I suppose a quick-and-dirty (or, perhaps, half-assed) reading of Eve's mirror stage would run as follows: the Eve-infant, not being yet in the symbolic order, has no clear boundaries between self and other. The disembodied voice effects the necessary misrecognition that is needed to give Eve a clear sense of herself as a discrete ego as well as her need to enter the symbolic order. And part of the force of Milton's bourgeois version of the Narcissus story is how deftly he combines the story of entry into language with that of entry into marriage. Once the Eve-infant has been compelled to grow out of her primary narcissism, her only choice lies in reverting back to narcissism or in going along with the wholesome bond of marriage.

The gravitational tug of this account feels awfully strong, but I think this reading suits, say, Ovid's version of the Narcissus story far better than Milton's. In Ovid, the poetic speaker berates and mocks Narcissus for loving his shadow, in which nothing of himself truly inheres; Narcissus chooses to love his own reflection anyways. I wonder if Mary Nyquist turns Milton's Eve too much into Ovid's Narcissus when she remarks--in an essay that ranks as among the handful of texts that have really taught me how to read Milton--that Eve’s “desire for an other self . . . is clearly and unambiguously constituted by illusion, both in the sense of specular illusion and in the sense of error." In a state of complete innocence, isn't it at least possible that Eve simply cannot fall into intellectual or moral error? What Eve attempts to explain here is her prelinguistic experience, when she has not yet experienced the split between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation. With eloquent concision, Eve's account reveals this split to be a temporal one. Before language, Eve can experience complete, seamless spontaneity: “I started back, / It started back”; “I soon returned, / Pleased it returned as soon.” Yet these line breaks emphasize how Eve’s narration undermines itself. Once stuck in language (which is also to be stuck in marriage), the image that is Eve’s self is doomed to be belated, its action delayed. As the voice rightly posits, Eve will be caught between the past-tense "came" and the present-tense "goes."

But before language--which is to say, before any concrete sense of herself versus another--how could Eve be incorrect? Before language--which is to say, before any temporal divide comes between herself and her image (or, should we say, learning the lesson of the disembodied voice, between herself and herself)--how could Eve possibly fall prey to an illusion? In the untimebound perfection before language, there may be absolutely no difference between loving another and loving yourself.

This might be the true shock of Milton's version of Narcissus. By virtue of not having a clear sense of self, pre-linguistic, premarital Eve might be more capable of loving another than she will ever be afterwards. This is not, then, the story of narcissism thwarted, but the story of narcissism instilled (and then only partly deflected). Once the voice teaches Eve that what she sees is herself, she will never have access to the undifferentiated perfection of loving another without even realizing that the other is the self--the golden rule embodied as it never could be again. For after this scene, Eve will be split twice, once by the order of language, and again by the economy of marriage, which will cast her in the role of second-order reflection. The point of Milton's story is not that the Eve-infant needs to learn a discrete sense of self and then to turn away from her innate narcissism in order to love another; rather, the realization that she has a discrete self shatters the Eve-infant's ability to love perfectly. Instead of loving another who is herself (the condition of which love qua love being her not having a sense of self), Eve will be forced to know herself through the order of language and to love another in the economy of marriage. As she rightly intuits, these are rather poor consolation prizes; as she is forced to learn, she has no other recourse.

"In me is no delay," Eve declares optimistically at the end of the epic, but her first waking experience suggests otherwise. Or, at least, it suggests that the place where no shadow stays her coming cannot be her union with Adam, but with unmediated access to God--but that's a matter for another entry.

Another way to explain the deftness of the reflecting-pool scene: neither Eve nor the disembodied voice are incorrect even though both seem wrong, and the reader is left to split the difference. Like Eve, the reader is stuck in language, and should simply side with the voice; yet the scene is powerful enough to give us a sense of what might have been on the other side.

Milton, gutbuster

I'm an inveterate Google stalker. And shameless, too--I'll often stun people by rattling off stuff I know about them through the internet. In one of my creepy e-stalking sessions, I ran across a random tidbit from Aaron Kunin (who plays the genius angle as convincingly as anyone in their thirties possibly could; almost disappointingly, he seems like a really nice, sincere person to boot). Kunin declares that Milton is a rare case of someone whose loss of humor can be dated rather precisely--to 1659. 

Kunin seems to be one of those people with whom I'd be sincerely nervous to disagree--rather than prove him wrong, my disagreement would most likely reveal how my brain waves operate a couple of registers below his. And surely the claim that jolly young Milton (you know, the one who found the death of Cambridge's carrier pretty funny shit) turned into a dour old man seems pretty unobjectionable. Just take a look at what occasions Milton's God to yuck it up in Paradise Lost: the astronomical quandaries created by his perspective-bending solar system; linguistic and political confusion after the fall of Babel. Grim. 

A tiny bit funnier but no less grim is the joke Milton's letter to Peter Heimbach in 1666: "One of those Virtues has not so pleasantly repaid to me the charity of hospitality, however, for the one you call Policy (and which I would prefer you call Patriotism), after having allured me by her lovely name, has almost expatriated me, as it were." Get it? Patriotism? Almost expatriated him? Sigh. Well, if you were blind, had been briefly imprisoned, and had had to hide for a while when you weren't sure you'd be hanged or not, maybe this'd be the level of etymological humor you'd be able to muster. 

Still, there are some funny moments in Milton's later writings. I particularly enjoy the joke with the long setup in Book IV of PL, which goes on and on about how carefully and strategically Eden has been situated with defense in mind. And then Satan with "one slight bound high over leaped all bound." Hey, Milton's no Eddie Izzard, but this joke shows some real attention to comedic timing. My current favorite late Milton joke is in Paradise Regained. In Book II, Satan solicits suggestions regarding how to tempt Jesus. Belial chimes in with his advice: "Set women in his eye." Satan quickly dismisses this ("Belial, in much uneven scale thou weigh'st / All others by thyself; because of old / Thou thyself dot'st on womankind") and declares the need for "manlier objects" to tempt Jesus. A couple hundred lines later, we learn what Satan really had in mind: the ensuing temptation features "Tall stripling youths rich-clad, of fairer hue / Than Ganymede or Hylas" in addition to some really hot (if chaste and forbidding) babes. In retrospect, we learn what Satan was really saying to Belial: "Listen, fratboy, not everyone's a breeder jock like you."

Come to think of it, there was a discussion on the Milton-L listserv about Miltonic humor. But I unsubscribed a while ago--that list wasn't funny anymore.

The argument

The idea for this blog sprung from my head a few days ago, and I type it into existence with my  digital word less than a week before Milton's four-hundredth birthday. If I uphold my original plan, every entry here will relate to Milton in some way. Sadly, my lack of talent (to say nothing of the cold, damp climate I inhabit) prevents me from taking up my friend's suggestion that I model this blog on Geoffrey Chaucer's by writing in Milton's voice. What readership I find will have to be content with musings about Milton's writings; Milton jokes and crudely photoshopped images; and attempts to think through contemporary events through a Miltonic lens. If all else fails, I'll become the Perez Hilton of the Milton community, airing as much tawdry Miltonist gossip as I can find.

To the obvious question of why, I give first a personal answer. This blog is my way of publicly admitting that my mind has taken a deep, perhaps indelible impression from Milton's writings. Faced with new knowledge, I frequently find myself appealing not only to the encyclopedic scope of Milton's thought, but also to the structure of questions and questioning that it provides. Call this blog, then, the confessions of a young Miltonist.

This self-serving project does, however, have some slightly bigger aims. Milton studies currently seems gripped by the rather peculiar fear of proving the author relevant, of rescuing him from an obsolescence that may or may not loom ominously. To the question of why Milton matters, I have no real answer--aside from the obvious: that literary history matters; that history matters; that the intersection of artistic, literary, and political history matters; that Milton certainly mattered to others who might still matter, including Olaudah Equiano, William Blake, Mary Shelley, Thomas Jefferson, Phyllis Wheatley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Hardy, T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, William Empson, C. S. Lewis, Peter Ackroyd, Philip Pullman, and any number of death metal bands who seem to think "Paradise Lost" is a nifty title--except to say that Milton matters to me. If I can explain why this is so in the unrarified, cacophonous hubbub of cyberspace, then perhaps I'll have made my small contribution to the task of saving Milton from pretend oblivion.

And, finally, I do want this blog to be a place for giving voice to embryonic ideas, glimmers, suspicions, and hunches without too much fear of error or lack of rigor. The title of this blog is my attempt to yoke Miltonic thought with a decidedly unmiltonic air of sprezzatura. Like all sprezzatura, of course, mine will be artificial, papering over my deep-seated fear of being mistaken or misunderstood. Still, I'll post quirky, half-baked ideas (and maybe even some of the idiosyncratic insights I've been hoarding desperately as my own) as often as my fortitude allows.